It started by pure chance – as so many of these things do, I suppose. But now? Well let's just say there's more than a tiny element of the deliberate involved. Let me explain...
When I say 'it started by pure chance' I mean that the discovery was accidental but the behaviour of my teenage son was anything but entirely normal. I'm Lucy, by the way, a fairly typical single mother – late thirties, single again after a reasonable attempt at the 'two are better than one' thing, still fairly presentable (enough to turn heads when I bother with ever-more-necessary make-up), a homeworker, vaguely intelligent (although you may beg to differ when you read this) – and something of an addict now, as you will see.
The genesis of this 'thing' was nothing more than a normal enough room-tidying session. I do these things occasionally, although my own mother will swear they never happen, and it was a normal enough day in every way. I had tidied the living room, my own bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom, the hallway and, finally, plucked up the courage to venture into my son's room to tackle that one.
My darling boy, Jason, if a nineteen-year-old can still be called a boy, was – he said – having a gap year between school and university. He'd done the whole 'travelling Europe' thing and had returned to the family nest for a few weeks before taking up a seat at a non-redbrick and rather nice establishment. A few weeks that, apparently, involved quite a lot of drinking, partying, attending rock concerts and burning large holes in the savings that should have been reserved for books and living accommodation expenses for the next three years. I admired him enough for it all, though – enough, in fact, that I would never admit it.
He was as fairly typical as I was, I suppose – a typical late teen with plenty of new muscles, a ratty haircut, two motorbikes and some very dubious friends of both genders (but mostly males). That particular day he had taken himself off to one of the said friends to 'help him pack ready for college' – which I knew translated to be 'a couple of days on the piss'. As I said, a fairly typical teen.
His room was, to say the least, verging on the untidy. Okay, to be more accurate, there could have been a small tribe of pygmy rhinoceroses living in there that had never seen the light of day, but I was a brave soul – and besides, I knew there must have been at least three-quarters of a halfway decent dinner service in there somewhere and I was running out of plates.
In I went with a determined air, plus two large rubbish sacks, a gasmask, an anti-rhino crowbar, my mobile phone in case I got lost or kidnapped, the satnav from my car, a week's supply of water and my sense of humour. Most of which I needed.
To be fair, it wasn't quite as bad as I feel I'm making it sound – but it was a tip. I located most of the plates and dishes, picked up a few pistons and sundry other oily bits of motorbike, pushed his laundry into the corner of the room (using the crowbar), and was about to beat a hasty retreat when I noticed that his laptop was glowing somewhere under his duvet. I had told him a few times – okay, a few hundred times – that this was a distinct waste of electricity for which I paid several limbs' worth every three months, and I went to switch it off.
I pulled back the duvet and sighed when I saw that he had left it while not only still switched on, but still logged on to some site or other.
Now, I'm not a nosy mother – or woman in general – but something about the screen caused me a slight pause and drew me a tiny but closer. The sort of tiny bit that actually allows you to read what the hell is being displayed.
In this case it was a chat site – an adult one, to be more precise. Now, I am not in any way averse to such sites, even for my own son and heir. He's almost twenty for heaven's sake, and I'm not stupid enough to think that someone of his age wouldn't dabble in such things occasionally – even using my electricity rather than his phone – but I was very much averse to him leaving the stupid thing logged on. As I said, I'm a homeworker, but very specifically, I'm a website designer and I know full damned well that such a behaviour can attract both nuisance hackers and even more nuisance-full advertisers. With a professional sigh and making a more maternal mental note to have yet another word with my wayward teen, I leaned forward with every intention of logging him out of whatever site he was 'entertaining' himself with and then hitting the power button.
My interest, though, was taken by the avatar name he had evidently been using. It was, of course, purely a professional interest... although my maternal instincts might well have been activated by the site's banner.
It was quickly clear that he had been chatting away on a site that was distinctly adult – the screen was plain enough, but the banner suggested 'erotica', the room choice was 'kinky mothers' and the top right-hand corner of the screen was dominated by bare breasts.
None of these things – truly and honestly – bothered me too much. Boys will be boys and teens will be teens – although that didn't stop me simply switching off the laptop rather than logging my errant son out of the site first. I left his room with the stack of crockery, crowbar under an arm, and a smile on my face. Naughty boy.
Later, though, I stopped to think.
*****
I had spent a couple of hours plate-scraping and washing everything in the dishwasher a few times, but my mind kept spinning back to my son's choice of chat sites. And perhaps more precisely, his choice of chat rooms.
I wasn't so dumb that I couldn't figure that 'kinky mothers' was more than likely a sort of shorthand for older women who wanted to get chattily naughty with guys – or more probably somewhere for naughty guys to go and impersonate naughty women so they could get off when other naughty guys could pretend to be desperate teens. But there again... I kept asking myself whether it really was a site where actual mothers – people like me – went to chat to genuine teenage sons to see what fantasies they shared. Or experiences.
It should have filled me with dread, that latter prospect, but for some reason it didn't. It didn't excite or arouse me, but it didn't leave me cold either. What it did do was make me wonder which version of those potentials was closer to the truth – or if both were there to some degree – and just what the hell was Jason doing there in any or either case! Surely there were more obviously 'normal' places for him to go...?
Naturally enough I decided that, as a caring mother and in no way a nosy bitch, I should investigate a little further, just to make sure that everything was normal enough and that Jason wasn't being led astray.
As a professional in the website world, the very fact that I had switched off the machine without noting down the actual site didn't faze me at all and knowing that I had another few hours at the very least before my son came home was comforting as well. I even made, and drank, a coffee before I went to retrieve the laptop.
I'm not really quite sure that my motives were entirely derived from maternal caring and defensiveness, but I can still use such values as spurs if I really need to. In any case, I sat down at the kitchen table with a knowing smile and a 'you don't escape that easy, angel' look on my face.
